Josh Marshall

Articles by
Josh

From the Guardian: "Russia's secret services are shielding Bosnian Serbs wanted by the war crimes tribunal in The Hague for atrocities committed during the Bosnian war, including the massacre at Srebrenica, where more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys were slaughtered."

Alright, I'm off. As I said, I'll pop in now and again over the next week. If you need to contact me, do so through the regular comments email. To contact Jon Chait, who'll be holding down the fort over the next couple days, use the email above.

(Note: For those of you who've kindly asked, no, I won't be posting from my honeymoon. We're taking that later this spring.)

One of the Democrats' greatest problems -- far more insidious than many realize -- is their desire to gain the approval and approbation of establishment Washington and its A-list pundits. The habit or inclination is rooted in a political world that ceased to exist 20 or 30 years ago, and even then was wrong-headed. Republicans, on the other hand, have long seen the relationship as fundamentally antagonistic (if not necessarily unfriendly) and have acted accordingly. On balance, that's led to better press treatment because, though they are loathe to admit it, the mix of editors and pundits and talk show hosts respect the treatment.

Democrats, from top to bottom, would do themselves no end of good if they simply acted on the assumption that the Washington establishment is not a constituency they are trying to appeal to or cultivate.

That doesn't mean they should ignore the Washington press. Far from it. They should state their views and demand they be fairly covered. But they should not act on the ingrained assumption that these people are basically like-minded people of shared assumptions and beliefs who can be appealed to on that basis.

All of that is another way of saying they should act like Republicans.

Now, let's take an example: Sebastian Mallaby's column this morning in the Washington Post. As you might expect, it's another entrant in 'Dems will do badly not putting forth their own plan' contest.

Mallaby says Democrats will find themselves in a similar spot to that which they did over Iraq. And though Mallaby puts himself down as a supporter of add-on accounts he says nevertheless that a party that refuses even "to contemplate carve-out accounts is a party that's closed its collective mind."

An implicit thread that runs through Mallaby's article becomes explicit when he says that "progressive Democrats should also admit the truth about Republican proposals: They're a heck of a lot better than leaving Social Security's deficit to get worse."

It does not seem to occur to Mallaby that the people who he is arguing against certainly do not believe this is so and furthermore that they have very strong and principled reasons for believing that -- many of which up-coming guest-blogger Jon Chait will no doubt discuss.

On balance I would class Mallaby's piece (along with a recent column by Matt Miller, for whom I have great respect) as another in a rash of recent examples of what we might call convulsive neoliberalism (a topic to be discussed later). But let's take a moment to think through Mallaby's point on the substance.

Democrats believe that private accounts destroy Social Security. That isn't rhetoric. It's the basis of their entire opposition. A private accounts system removes the guarantees and sharing of risk that are at the heart of social insurance. Agree with that or disagree with that. That's what Democrats believe. And yet to Mallaby ruling out private accounts makes them unserious, negative and irresponsible.

In the old days, keeping an open mind about voting for laws which you believe to be fundamentally wrong or misguiding was called cynicism. But I guess times change.

Mallaby presumably also buys into what is now the consensus assumption that private accounts at a minimum do nothing to improve solvency. On top of that, private accounts intentionally push the financing of Social Security as a defined-benefit program toward dissolution -- though not everyone yet admits this. (One might even add to the equation that in the most similarly-situated country where this change has been attempted, it has been judged so spectacularly unsuccessful more or less across the political spectrum that they are now attempting to go back to a system like ours. Mallaby may have heard of the place: Britain.) But again, opposing private accounts means you're not being serious.

Now, on the politics. The president has yet to introduce any plan. He only says he wants private accounts. That's his one bottom line. He won't come forward with a plan, even though he clearly has one, because he wants to make it more difficult for his opponents to attack him. The president has just been reelected. He has majorities in both houses of congress. He has, on this issue, especially, a favorable media. And in the three months he has been pushing this plan, public support for it has gone from luke-warm to flat cold. This is apparently a bad situation for the Democrats.

Even the premise of Mallaby's logic is flawed. Democrats have a plan for solvency. And everyone has a fairly clear idea what it would be. It'd be something along the lines of Bob Ball's or the Orszag/Diamond plan, a mix of tax increases and benefit cuts to bring the numbers into line -- something that would not require particularly drastic moves on either side.

What the Democrats haven't done is to formally get behind a concrete proposal, which is to say that they haven't done exactly what the president hasn't done.

And why should they? Every pol with a brain knows there is no point putting up a detailed plan which makes for a ready target when your opponents are in the midst of getting mauled over their idea. That may not go over well in civics class or at the Post editorial board. But it is straight politics as it is always played and for which no apologies are necessary. But in Mallaby's view, despite the extremely disadvantaged position Democrats find themselves in in Washington today, having a hand on not one lever of power: they should nonetheless sacrifice what they believe in order to be entirely indifferent to which political strategy will be advance their principles.

What that advice makes clear comes out in other parts of his piece --his relative indifference to the issues under consideration. You'll note that in various parts of his piece he lauds President Bush and congressional Republicans for selflessly putting themselves out there to raise the cry about the coming disasters to face Security Security. The president, he says, is "out there touring the country, trying to open people's minds to the necessity of reform; meanwhile, Republican members of Congress are sticking their necks out with detailed overhaul proposals."

Though he says he supports add-on accounts, it is also clear that he buys into most if not all of the essential premises of the privatization argument, even down to a few of the bogus statistics. To him, having private accounts inside or outside Social Security is basically an organizational matter on the order of deciding whether one might raise the retirement age one year or shave a bit off indexing of benefits to improve the program's solvency. In other words, an important question but hardly a matter of transcendent consequence of principle.

At the end of the day, the fundamental issue, at least as the Democrats see it (and as we're learning, much of the public) is simply invisible to Mallaby. He can't get his head around the notion that people really see private accounts as that big a deal. And that shapes his view of the entire matter. Because of that he can't see that the debate we're having isn't about solvency but about whether the country will make the historic decision to get rid of the Social Security system and replace it with something very different. In that debate, Democrats have a position that is straightforward, on the table, and emphatically clear. It's Social Security. Period. Democrats want to keep the current system. That's very clear.

Mallaby is living in a mental world of premises and assumptions (both political and in policy terms) which no Democrat should even remotely be a part of.

Any Democrat who would be rattled by Mallaby's reasoning would have to be one who is petrified of the idea of suffering some political setback somewhere, somehow, for some reason, even though all available evidence points in the opposite direction.

Mallaby's political advice strikes me as silly. But if it could be shown to me that defending Social Security was a risky proposition politically, it wouldn't affect my thinking at all. Some things are so important they're worth losing over. And when political parties realize that is generally when they start winning. A political party that is scared to run risks over matters of grand importance even when the public volubly says it has their backs is a party that scarcely deserves to exist.

Yep, the Dems have a problem on their hands. According to the just-released ABC/WaPopoll, President Bush's approval rating on Social Security has fallen to 35%, the lowest of his presidency. And 58% say that the more they learn about his plan, the less they like it. On the other hand, no Republican has yet moved to impeach the president over private accounts nor does there appear to be significant support among House Republicans for tarring and feathering him. So the Democrats may have overreached.

I'm going to be stepping away from the site this week; but I'll be leaving it in the hands of an eclectic trio of guest bloggers that I think you'll really enjoy. I'll pop in here and there with a post. But I am taking a week away from the site to ... well, it sounds so matter-of-fact and prosaic to just say it, but to get married. If all goes according to plan I'll be back fulltime next Monday or Tuesday.

Starting Monday, Jon Chait of The New Republic will take over for a couple days. He has a new article out this week on the Dems and just why they should do everything in their power to stop Bush in his tracks on phasing out Social Security. (I'm hoping the TNR Internet gods will choose to make his piece available to non-subscribers, given its inherent newsworthiness and the fact that I imagine he'll be referring to it with some frequency. No need on the companion piece by Gregory Mankiw, for reasons noted here.)

Signing on for the last couple days of the week will be Harry Shearer, actor, political wit, voice on The Simpsons, Derek Smalls of Spinal Tap, creator of Le Show and so much more. Notwithstanding the fact that I'll be in my last couple days of bachelorhood I'll definitely be stopping by a lot to see what on earth Harry chooses to write about.

Then over the weekend and through Monday, Ed Kilgore of NewDonkey.com and the Democratic Leadership Council will return for more excellent posting and probably a bit more of what will hopefully be fruitful antagonism with parts of our readership. (Among other benign qualities, blogs can, I think, be a wonderful venue for group or perhaps couples therapy for squabbling national political parties.)

So, my deep thanks to each of them for minding the fort while I'm away.

Bless their hearts. The In This Together campaign, the New York state pro-Social Security coalition, already has up a spoof of the Bamboozlepalooza Tour website put up by the Treasury Dept. and noted below. And unlike a lot of these parodies, this one's actually straightforward and dead-pan enough to be pretty funny. Take a look.

We've fielded a bunch of questions of late about just who's paying the expenses for the Bamboozlepalooza Tour. And the question is raised again now by the fact that the administration has set up a Bamboozlepalooza website. (I kid you not.) In case you didn't know, it's strengtheningsocialsecurity.gov. Take a look. After all, you paid for it.

Now, about that question of who pays for this stuff ...

Certainly, as the government has expanded onto the Internet, it is taken as a given (and rightly so, I think) that office-holders in different branches of government will use their government websites to advocate their views. The folks on the Hill on the both sides of the aisle do it. The White House website certainly presses the White House's case. At the same time, there are strict rules about those sites not being used in political -- or more specifically, electoral -- campaigns.

It seems to me that there is some question about whether the White House can or should be able to set up a site for its own propaganda using a .gov extension. But that doesn't seem to me to be the issue most worthy of discussion.

What about the Bamboozlepalooza Tour itself? Who pays? Yes, no doubt, presidents can go on tours of the country pressing their legislative agenda. You can go back to the ill-fated example of Woodrow Wilson to find precedents for that.

It is also true that presidents and cabinet secretaries make all sorts of appearances before private organizations where the public is not allowed or appearances where attendance is restricted on various bases. It is even true that tickets for presidential events are often doled out (under both parties) as a sort of minor patronage for local political supporters and bigwigs. And no one would deny that a White House can take practical steps to manage attendence at presidential events.

But it has become quite clear in this case -- almost old-hat, you might say -- that all the events the president is holding on Bamboozlepalooza are restricted to people who support his agenda. Sometimes disagree-ers (or should we call them dissidents?) slip through. But the White House takes affirmative and fairly successful steps to exclude those who are not supporters.

We got used to this during the campaign. But that's different: Campaigns are private organizations. They have their own money. They can do pretty much what they want in this regard and are only limited by the constraints of public ridicule.

Taken altogether, though, something seems qualitatively different to me about what's happening here -- specifically, the nexus of taxpayer funding and ideological litmus tests for inclusion. Nobody would imagine that the president would or could restrict public White House tours to political supporters. Yet here the administration has undertaken what is quite publicly a taxpayer-funded public advocacy campaign. And yet only those who pass a political test are allowed to attend.

I know we all sort of already know that. But if it doesn't violate a law (and perhaps it does), it should certainly violate public sensibilities more than it seems to be and provoke more than mere eye-rolling. Along with phony-baloney news, doctored government statistics and paid-off pundits, it is yet another sign -- if now, admittedly, only on the margins -- of the Pravdafication of civic discourse under this administration.

Back around the time of the Clinton health care debate William Kristol drafted an influential memo suggesting that the best course for the GOP was "principled"/ideological opposition to ANY compromise on a universal health care plan. Beyond his ideological opposition to further government intervention in this area, he argued that politically, setting up a grand new entitlement (which would no doubt be tinkered with and expanded over the years) would redound to the Democrats long term poltical interests. He was very wrong on the substance of the issue - but very right on the politics of it. The Republicans paid no price, indeed prospered from their derailing of national health care.

Now we face the mirror image of the Clinton health care debate and it's instructrive to see how both the media and the opposition party play their hands. I don't recall any hue and cry from the Beltway pundit class that the GOP needed to come up with an alternative to Clinton's plan. In fact the media focus was exclusively on Clinton and the trouble he was having crafting a plan and rounding up votes. By the way Clinton had much more support in Congress (and in the country) on the health care issue than Bush does now on Soc Sec; yet the Beltway pundits are putting the heat on Dems to come up with their own plan.

As for the Dems, it's a dispiriting commentary on the weakness and cowardice of the national party that people like Carville are falling for the "we can't be seen to be just obstructionists" line. Beltway Dems are so inured [to] the Russert/Cokie/Judy/Matthews Conventional Wisdom axis that their political radar is way off target. What they don't seem to understand is that standing firm against the destruction of Social Security IS an agenda and a statement of values. As Chait wrote in the TNR - the notion that Democrats will pay a political price for stopping an unpopular program is utter lunacy - but the GOP with the help of the Beltway pundit class are pushing this line. Could people like Harry Reid and Joe Biden really believe this?

Here's hoping that like Kristol's Memo more than a decade ago, Chait's piece becomes the Dem playbook.